I am really struggling with Deronda as a character. He just feels like a Mary Sue / Marty Stu to me. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is a good history in
Smithsonian Magazine:
Quote:
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Mary Sues can be found throughout the history of literature, standing on the shoulders of earlier fill-in characters, like Pollyanna, the unfailingly optimistic protagonist from Eleanor H. Porter’s children’s books from the 1910s. More recently, cousins to the term can be found in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as coined by Nathan Rabin in his review of the Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown, and the Jennifer Lawrence-personified “Cool Girl.”
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"Mary Sues" as a concept date back to 1973 and the term came about exclusively in the Star Trek fandom. Marty Stu is a moniker that was adopted later to encompass male characters who operated the same way. But the notion of a character that is just so capital-G-Good that everyone loves them and can do no wrong definitely dates further back. Daniel just wants to rescue everyone, and everyone wants him to rescue them.
I would have been far more interested in the novel if it focused on (and found a plausible way to intertwine) Gwendolyn and Mirah's stories.